UWA roundtable debates standards and market barriers to UHD adoption

An IBC2024 roundtable discussion on UHD highlighted the work of the China-based UHD World Association (UWA) and its development of two new standards to deliver a compelling UHD experience – HDR Vivid and Audio Vivid, as well as providing a forum for a broad range of UHD-involved experts to air their thoughts and concerns.

Rua Aguete, Senior Research Director at Omdia, moderated the event saying that it had brought together the “brightest minds in the 4K Ultra HD world”.

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HDR Vivid and Audio Vivid

Delivering the opening presentation, Vincent Zhang, Secretary General of the UWA, introduced the organisation and its technical standards and ecosystem.

The UWA is an international non-governmental organisation with 360 members spanning production, transmission and service providers, chipset and device manufacturers and institutions.

Zhang said the group wants to build an industrial ecosystem around core standards, committed to an open and friendly intellectual property rights (IPR) policy so that users can afford the cost of developing UHD technologies.

Standards are grouped under the HDR Vivid and HDR Audio umbrellas. The HDR Vivid standard was released four years ago, and currently, said Zhang, five platforms provide 30,000 hours of HDR Vivid-compliant content. HDR Vivid devices span 271 models of mobile phone, TV set-tops, tablets and PCs.

Audio Vivid meanwhile is supported within 127 products. In June, the group released the first 3D audio standard for EVs supporting vehicle mounted sound systems.

The first UWA Summit was held in Shenzhen last November, attracting over 500 attendees. The organisation is making a concerted effort to internationalise itself, said Zhang. It currently has 39 international members from 20 countries and regions.

Following Zhang’s introduction of the UWA, the roundtable heard about two case studies.

Lyu Chao of China Telecom introduced E-Surfing Digital Life Technology, a subsidiary of the group with 900 employees, 64% of which are involved in R&D, and which operates two regular 4K live channels and one regular 8K channel.

As a second case study, Gavin Ho, VP of Technology at Insight TV, said that his group had been distributing a UHD linear service, fully compliant with the ITU-R BT.2100 specification. Insight TV UWA kicked off last September, working with the organisation’s technical team on developing in-house container-based encoding tools for its existing library and future productions. It is currently looking at how to exploit its existing library and deliver it in HDR Vivid and Audio Vivid. The UWA provided detailed documentation to support the container-based pipeline, he said.

Market penetration

Following the presentations, the roundtable session opened for questions and discussion, with a primary focus on the penetration of UHD in the European market.

Cristiano Benzi, SVP Global – Professional Video at Eutelsat said that adoption of UHD TV had been slower than anticipated in Europe, despite the efforts of the satellite operators and others to promote the format. He said that fewer than 10 UHD TV channels were being broadcast at the 13° East Hotbird satellite position, out of a total of around 1,000 channels overall.

Benzi said that development of UHD was “a bit stuck”, with a problem that broadcasters and consumers do not yet view it as a format that delivers value.

Lennart Sohst, Senior Manager and Solution Architect at HD+, the German aggregation platform, said that that UHD channels were available in the German market from Sky and that HD+ had aggregated live event channels from major broadcasters. He said that while there is a substantial amount of event-based live content broadcast in UHD on the platform, 24/7 linear channels were still absent.

Sohst added that HD+ is running an application, available in about 80% of new UHD devices sold in the country, that automatically switches viewers to UHD when it is available. However, shortage of UHD content remained a significant barrier.

Ben Schwarz, Senior Managing Consultant of CTOi Consulting, dissented from the view that consumers do not see a benefit to UHD, pointing to the success of streaming providers such as Netflix and Apple in promoting UHD content on their subscription services.

Andy Quested, International Production and Accessible Media Standards Consultant with the ITU, said that adoption curves for new TV formats were generally slower than anticipated. He believed the future of the format lay with “application-based viewing” – with streaming rather than with over-the-air broadcast, which in his opinion would soon be rendered obsolete.

Content availability

Andrew Dunne, Technical Subject Matter Expert – Television Production and Delivery at the BBC, said the UK public broadcaster was focused on delivering UHD via its iPlayer streaming offering rather than broadcast, including for live event coverage. He said that when available, roughly a third of the audience for a show found the UHD version.

Dunne said that the cost of production meant that the BBC looked to international partners to get UHD content made. The content is therefore distributed on platforms other than the BBC’s own across global markets, with the cost of production being shared between the different partners.

Dunne said that the BBC had around 500 hours of UHD content available on iPlayer, with about 100 hours being made each year, most with long-term licences in place. Some content, such as the broadcaster’s recent coverage of Glastonbury festival, comes with shorter-term licences, in this case being made available live and then for 30 days on iPlayer.

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Dunne said one complication was that the BBC operated separate workflows for live and VOD content, with live (for example sports coverage) being filmed at 50fps and on-demand content – which could be drama content or natural history for example – being filmed at 25fps. Glastonbury coverage was therefore filmed ‘live’ at 50fps and then had to be down-converted for on-demand viewing.

Dunne turned his attention to the question of whether it is appropriate to upscale archive content to UHD to increase the amount of content available in the format. He said archive content on iPlayer existed in a range of formats including both SD and HD and that the BBC’s audience “would not want it to be upscaled”. He said the BBC took the view that upscaling is not appropriate for archive content.

Dunne also endorsed the view that Wide Colour Gamut (WCG) was more important than image resolution in making UHD appealing to a wider audience. He said that audiences could benefit from WGC on a small screen with relatively low resolution, while the benefit of high-resolution images required them to be “really close to a big screen”.

Mismatch

There followed a short presentation from Omdia where Rua Aguete highlighted what she said was a mismatch between the availability of UHD-compliant consumer equipment and the supply of content.

In markets such as the UK, consumers buying new sets typically seek out UHD displays, but are often subsequently unaware if they are watching UHD content or not. However, streaming providers such as Netflix have been successful in marketing UHD premium services to a tier of their users who then typically watch more TV than other non-premium subscribers.

Outside of premium tiers, round-table participants were broadly in agreement that advertisers are currently unwilling to take on the cost of producing their own content in UHD.

Ricardo Medina, President of UHD Spain, noted that broadcasters are not paying more for UHD content, leaving producers to pick up the added costs.

Fernando Garcia Calvo, CEO of The Channel Store, said that he was trying to promote UHD as an important way to encourage viewing of FAST channels. However, he said, advertisers typically think about the volume of spots they can buy rather than about image quality.

Sohst of HD+ said that consumers still do not fully recognise the difference between HD and UHD, leading Elfed Howells, Chair of the Promotion & Communications Module (PCM) of the DVB to endorse the view that other elements of UHD were more important than resolution, with consumers more likely to perceive a benefit from HDR. He said that HDR Vivid, the standard created by the UWA, could make a difference, with the audio standard also likely to stimulate interest.

Howells said that China had successfully used large public screens showing UHD content to promote the benefits of UHD viewing, encouraging aspirational consumers to attempt to replicate the experience in their own homes.

Rounding off the session, the UWA’s Zhang extended an open invitation to join the organisation, highlighting its ambition to become an international body, with non-Chinese firms able to contribute to an open standard.

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